THE TEST COOK SUPERCUT: How Cecelia Reached the Perfect Cuban Sandwich Recipe

In our brand new series, The Test Cook, Cook’s Country editor Cecelia Jenkins came up with an incredible recipe for the perfect Cuban sandwich. Now you can watch each phase of recipe development in one supercut video!

Get the Mojo Pork recipe: https://cooks.io/34h8jfQ
Get the Cuban Bread recipe: https://cooks.io/2PCdrpL
Get the Cuban Sandwich recipe: https://cooks.io/31MDqjY

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[Music] from a really young age all i watched was cooking shows i have this vivid memory of standing on a stool next to my mom as she was deveining shrimp and she was making risotto from like a clipping out of the new york times so i remember helping her with that and thinking that was really cool [Music] i kind of found my way to food in like a backwards path like i have a lot of interest but i didn’t know out of college what i wanted to do i thought long and hard about going to culinary school and it was the right move my name is cecilia jenkins and i am a senior editor on cook’s country magazine [Music] cuban sandwich recipe was something that we’ve talked about for a while because we all love keeping sandwiches i mean what’s not to love right but for something that’s sort of a sandwich right which sounds like maybe you don’t really need like an extensive recipe for we figured the way to get into it was to really go to the birthplace of the cuban sandwich to talk to the people that are really involved with the history of the cuban sandwich and and where it comes from and so the first step was for brian to go with steve clyze who is our staff photographer to tampa they were able to access you know all the greatest minds of cuban sandwich making in the country so the thing that all of the cuban sandwiches we had in tampa had in common was that all the cuban bread came from lassego de bakery they turn out just like an absurd absurd amount of cumin bread every day the bread is extremely flaky on the crust like we’ve gone to such lengths to like not have it not have our loaves have a skin before we do anything with them but like here they were almost trying to do it on purpose this is the authentic version of a cuban sandwich with the ham the rose port the cheese the pickles and the mustard on the top portion of bread only so it doesn’t overwhelm the palette when you bite into it you know what we got next here next let’s see this is their cuvette oh wow that looks awesome what’s missing mustard exactly and you’re basically done i’m ready people are very opinionated about the cuban sandwiches and like they have hardcore rules about this is correct and this is incorrect so that was the uh that was the cuban sandwich experience that was what we went through all right so great all right thanks yeah cheers thank you well so initially when we um start talking about the recipes that we’re gonna do we need some inspiration for them you know my trip is an inspiration but we need to see something on paper we need to kind of have a starting point so what cecilia does is she gathers all these recipes from different sources and we kind of look through them and see which is the best we’re looking for like five strong samples of roasted pork for example um and we hope that each of them is different in some way that we can really test the variable okay let’s start off with the columbia yellow bro let me see um the food and wine so at the end of that meeting we have a good breakdown of what is out there in the world what people are doing for methods and what ingredients are important what ingredients are outliers but 160 isn’t that really low and we’ll pick which recipes show a good range of what’s out there well cecilia is great because she never quits and i knew this would be a very difficult recipe but cecilia’s just uh a very strong recipe developer she’s always questioning what the next move is and what it should be she’s just very thorough in her testing you know and if she’s not happy with something she’s not gonna let me sign off on it so she has to love the recipe as much as i do so our main focus will be on the two main components here the bread and the moho roast pork the pitch meeting is the proposal at edit meeting which can be scary because you’re sitting in front of the entire editorial team at coast country so everyone from editors to photographers art directors and stylists like it’s scary because people will ask you questions that are really good questions and you should know the answer to and i try to when i do my proposals i try to make sure that i’ve thought about every possible angle that somebody could spin this or what questions are people gonna ask me about why we’re doing this or what makes this special what makes us significant what makes us good this is an extraordinary amount of work for a sandwich so let’s talk about that yeah and let’s talk about how we are going to sell the idea that it is worth it the bread seems like a high hurdle i mean you can press this bread i mean like really like instead of buying a supermarket bag at that is similar enough we yeah we could use store-bought bread but that’s what everybody does literally every recipe that i pulled said if you’re in tampa buy cuban bread but for everyone else who’s not in tampa just use this like soft squishy roll or a baguette which is i don’t feel is right at all here but a lot of recipes just gave substitutes and why would we want to be like everyone else my idea for the recipe was that each component could stand alone so the bread could stand alone is just a typical loaf of cuban bread and it would be great to eat on the side of whatever dinner you’re having and the roast pork would be equally great on a holiday table as it would be in sandwiches you know so all the components would stand alone on their own yeah and you most importantly got our [Music] subscribers yes [Music] i think the biggest concern i have is whether or not she will be able to create recipes for the bread and the pork and the sandwich all of which can stand alone that’s a lot of pieces it’s a lot of moving pieces and to be able to keep something like you know the auto leaves for your bread and and the proof stages of your bread in your head along with the marinating of the pork in your head those are very different disciplines in the kitchen and so she has to think with both sides of her brain all the time and i think with that many balls in the air of course it’s likely you’re gonna drop one [Music] so now that we’ve picked all the recipes i’ve put in all my orders for everything that i need and i’ve come up with the chart that shows basically like the recipes that we picked i actually was hoping that i’d be a little further along it’s just a lot of like it’s a lot of work to get this thing like off the ground in this scenario and in most scenarios the the cook in this case cecilia will go into the kitchen and cook through five recipes that already exist in the world and see what she can learn from that i hate making trips so i’m gonna take all this at once i know i don’t like when those plastic things touch your face because they’ve been like all over everything which is gross okay so this is the first recipe from my five recipe test so this is the panda agua which is a traditional cuban style bread but without any fat when bread is done i look for like that you can poke it and it’ll spring back that means you’ve worked the gluten enough i’m going to cover this with plastic and it’s going to proof for an hour until doubled i think i’m most nervous about the bread because i’ve done a couple breads here but bread isn’t really in my wheelhouse so first bread’s in yemen so i’m gonna keep making doughs shaping and proofing and then baking this one is the panda agua so no fat uh super chewy that’s good oh two two for two one of those little freezer baguettes yeah um so this one had butter in it instead of lard you just brush it with water before you put it in the oven it’s a really easy dough to work with yeah so this has three tablespoons of lard that looks fluffy that should be and cotton yeah this one had a sponge and you the drying method was really interesting so once you’ve shaped it you move it onto a rimmed baking sheet with sprinkled with cornmeal then you sprinkle the loaves with flour to dry out the exterior put a dry kitchen towel over it and then that was the one that i showed you when you press it you had you had a full skin that formed you can actually like once you slash it the skin like releases yeah i think this is the closest so far i would like it a little bit crustier on the exterior okay you know but i think the way it like kind of breaks apart and like it comes all over the place all right because i think it’s a tasty bread [Music] we set a pretty high bar for the pork because for one thing we’ve we’ve braised and roasted a lot of pork in this house so the first pork test i think was is really interesting because we very much expected a lot of them to be fantastic i think boneless pork shoulder is going to be diseased to find in grocery stores i feel like boning can be kind of hard sometimes i don’t know i mean maybe this one is promising the one these are boneless short ribs these might be good because they won’t take as long so just to recap today we’re doing the porks we’re tasting those but then i also saved moho sauces for us to try oh so bro marinating thank god so these are the recipes the bread recipes yes these are the three bread recipes that we wanted to look at so three four and five so i thought number three despite like some of the other opinions was the most familiar to me okay i know when it came out of the oven it was super crosty but the inside was really what was like light and cottony is there anything here i mean i know you had some room temperature lord i mean i kind of feel like it’s it’s fun to eat lard go big or go home i think we should do four tablespoons and then i can zone in on that later yeah because most of them had four tablespoons of fat cool i’ll write this up now great okay so i’m going to take the last one of my five recipe tests out this one right here just the bottom should we see i’m following the recipe they said to put it in there with the marinade but uh you want to pull it out i think it’s good in some countries that’s all they eat is the burnt bitter bottom so yeah well i think you kind of just know that you ground it’s not gonna no i’m gonna that’s all i’m gonna eat is just the black stuff i think it’s the lime juice wasn’t that marinated yeah it was two cups of lime juice overnight i think it’s a lot so i don’t know i feel like i’ll start with start with number one so so it’s a uh boneless pork butt it was like seven pounds it’s so dry yeah this one is also a boneless pork butt marinated in sour orange juice and inside of it it’s drier than hell on the other side it’s kind of nice and moist look how dry this side is though that i think the marinade is just such a bad idea well this is going well this is a ham bone in well i mean at least it’s dry it is traditional to have a mojo marinade for cuban rose pork so that is marinated with a lot of acid and what i kept finding consistently was that that acid was drawing out moisture a little terrible yeah all pretty disappointing oh that’s good no there’s only one way to go up i mean there’s only one way to there’s only one down which way to go i think all these have so much acid that they’re drying the meat out and yeah they’re just chalky i feel like these are all terrible but i think that’s a great thing because we now know it doesn’t work and there’s we just we just go up from here these were all kind of disappointing um yeah i’m honestly just kind of pooped so we’re in the business of constantly critiquing each other’s food and you have to be able to kind of let it roll up your back and just take it in stride you kind of have to be okay with knowing that you’re gonna go home and not know the answer to this puzzle that you’re working on and you have to kind of know that like the next day you’ll figure it out you know there’s there’s no victory worth having if you didn’t have to work for it a little bit but the great thing about cecilia is she’s willing to go into that kaleidoscope because she likes to find her way back out if you can go into that mess and get back out cleanly you really have something special yesterday was the cuban bread i took it first to have it making my own version and it didn’t really go so well [Music] brian and i decided what we wanted to take from certain recipes and we wrote up a recipe [Music] part of what i’m supposed to do is do some reading up on the science of bread making so basically i have like this whole chapter this whole chapter to read i worry about [Music] getting into a corner of frustration that takes a little bit too much work to get out of when i took it out of the oven i was actually excited about it because i thought it looked right but then the crust wasn’t right that probably means that we cut too much out of the recipe like we took out the sponge because it was an extra step that we didn’t know we didn’t know if it was necessary [Music] since we didn’t love any of them for the pork five recipe i’ll go i pulled a bunch of company recipes that we know that they’re gonna yield pork that’s like juicy and the method is right so then it’s a matter of like working in the flavor and seeing how that’ll work with it i have faith in cecilia i know she she wants to find the way she believes in the finish line i think the trick will be to keep everything moving in a positive direction as much as possible unfortunately we hit the weekend i had to change gears to do tv stuff wednesday i needed a day to take in everything that happened about with bread last week and pork last week i read those 90 pages took four pages of notes chatted with him about ideas of avenues we could take [Music] so i was reading the bread bible and she said your sponge should be like 151 yeah so it’s my sponge and then my dough okay okay thank you aj’s worked with he was a biochemist and now he’s you know our bread guru so just wanted to get a quick answer from him to proceed supposed to be really cutting and light and airy on the inside we’re going to try this right now a was my working recipe at 375 and it went 27 minutes internal temperature of 210. yeah so we were having a relatively hard time getting that crispy exterior crust that we really wanted and thought was just the you know the iconic version of cuban bread that we were after so we talked to andrew janzigan who’s test cook over on cooks illustrated and he’s basically the bread master and he suggested covering the the loaves for the first several minutes of baking because as the loaves cook they evaporate moisture and with the cover on that that moisture gets trapped condenses and falls back down on the loaves and gelatinizes the starch and is you’re more likely to get that crispy exterior the cuban mojo sauce has a ton of garlic oregano cumin and a lot of citrus juice traditionally it’s sour orange juice i made three company recipes of moho sauces and they’re way better than what we had prior with the five recipe desk one of the ones that we had in our archives from the past included pineapple juice that we found was a really nice addition because it balanced out some of the sharp acidity of of the mojo of the other ingredients the acid was just too powerful i think it was drying out the meat and these just taste more balanced because they have the fat in there to help round out the harshness of the acid so what i’m going to do is take these company recipes and marinate some boneless pork butts overnight and then tomorrow i’ll come in and roast them off and then we’ll try them and hopefully the mojos will be exactly the flavors that we want or get us on the right track okay this is his bar is very high his palate is sharp there’s no scenario in which brian’s going to make you do work that just for the sake of doing work he’s going to make you do work because he wants it right so what i did was we to get to that end result i mixed a combination of orange juice lime juice and pineapple juice the pineapple juice really helped in this case because those citrus juices can be so acidic that you needed something to kind of take the edge off you feel a lot better about this yeah a little scary that’s my recipe tastes a little scary hi so the pork uh pork one and three have been resting for 30 minutes so i was gonna see if you guys want to try them i did this recipe so many times that i had enough data collected with the method that i landed on that i was really confident yeah that’s that that is the reaction that we want your damn sure i knew that he was excited about it and it was great that he was there and and i was really happy that he liked it because after so much after so many wrong turns and and then you think you’re on a right one you want you want to make sure that people like it like i know when a recipe is on a good track when you like you have people try it and everyone kind of like you’re like oh whoa we’re onto something [Music] i cooked them covered all the way through basically and then took the top the lid off and broiled it but we didn’t like how it looked it looked really uneven and parts were kind of burnt tasting so everyone’s broiler is different it’s kind of an uncontrollable variable this recipe was particularly complicated because she’s making elements that need to stand alone but also need to sing perfectly together in the final sandwich [Music] that process of taking that working recipe dissecting it pulling every piece of it apart and really zeroing in on every detail to make sure it’s exactly right that’s a process [Music] i’m gonna go back to the covered and then uncovered but maybe less time covered not as much as i did two days ago where it was wasn’t covered very long and then it dried out and everything over reduced and then for as far as bread goes we were also thinking about as the bread proofs once it’s shaped sprinkling the top with flour so that it dries out but then in theory there’s more flour on the exterior so that if you are able to trap the steam in the oven there’s more starch to gelatinize and give you a crust so that’s a theory that we have we feel pretty good about where the bread was yesterday hopefully today some of the stuff pans out all things considered the fact that she’s working on three very intensive recipes the pork and the um and the bread simultaneously i mean usually the cooks are assigned one of these recipes that’s pretty intense i think she’s doing a great job with the timeline she’s so thorough she’s every day she’s been thinking about what the next test is she’s talking to me every day and she’s yeah she’s a champ i did that test where i was covering the bread to get initial steam we went to higher oven temperature may have worked we’re not sure but when she uncovered it she stuck to her times in the recipe instead of like continuing to thank these until they got fully browned so there as a result they’re definitely not going to be crazy so with the last one at 400 degrees i was pulling it out and then aj was like well why is it so pale and i was like well it’s supposed to be pale and then he was like if it’s that pale you know you can just leave it back in you can leave it in and let it get to the right color well that’s the constant problem i mean especially with something like this like we gotta get through it but you can’t brush bread you know you want to put your hands on things and fix them right away but honestly you have to walk away and that’s not just true here that’s true the very end the test went kind of awry i should have just made a game time decision and kept them in longer and then i wouldn’t be redoing this now so i lost like five hours this is taking a lot longer than i need it to i’m here early i’m staying late and when you have a test that goes awry in like the last five minutes i mean each component takes so long problem it’s a little problem yeah not good um i will wash that um i’ll just tell this thing punishment punishment this one went to 190. the other two went to 205. it looks like you got this one down pretty well this is moist over here they were all the same weight 5’7 yeah the thing about pork butts boneless and bone and pork butts is they come in all different shapes and sizes they can all weigh very similar weights but some can be skinny and long others can be fat and wide and tall and they will as a result cook at different rates when cecilia’s cooking five different roasts at the same time yeah in theory they’re all five pounders but they’re not all cooked at the same rate it sucks when you do all this work and then the test doesn’t go right and then you don’t even bother to call your team so which is what i did i didn’t bother calling them because it was all dry i got brian’s opinion which is what i needed and i think you know it’s like why have them try dry pork if i can do it better she’s not a rule follower at all she has a an understanding of what will work or what won’t work she’s studied she knows the traditional way to do things or the classic way to do things but she gets i think like a thrill of thinking about a different or a better way to do things so it’s tuesday i’ve been working on this for about 15 days i should just say 20 because i’ve been thinking about it on the weekends too so my timer for all four of those are staggered by like two minutes each and then i have two pork roasts one’s at 189 and one’s at 182. i know i understand that a mojo is very traditional but like i just keep thinking like the pork roast that we’ve done with the cure and the salt overnight so much better season than this we’ve had so much success in the past with just um like a sugar salt rub overnight because the salt deeply penetrates the meat better than a marinade if it’s just in a rub so it wasn’t until we decided okay we’re really not getting anywhere with this mojo marinade let’s try it versus a mojo inspired sugar salt rub overnight did you try a cuban roast pork just by itself yeah when you were in tampa not on a sandwich just like yeah just for smoking okay so is that the general practice people just put it in an acidic marinade and leave it there for like a short time and then this is how it always tastes yeah but this is better but this is better ryan has a really big heart he is an incredibly supportive partner in these things he wants it right honestly it was something that i thought of immediately when i got this recipe but as a group we decided it was not traditional and we were trying to stay very close to what was traditional we had a lot of people to make happy and if i didn’t have a very strong argument to diverge from that i wasn’t going to do it so this is covered 450 yes this is also 450 but uncovered so obviously getting more height on this one which is nice and the crime is still good but this one is spreading out wider rather than as tall so we should consider a few different options well i feel like the slashing i’m a little nervous about because i feel like people like i wasn’t going super deep i know i watched that so i feel like people would be inclined to like really like get in there i can i can say go like a quarter of an inch yeah we usually do say like some kind of shadow and go pretty shallow but i think it might still be a problem so you said one at 450 which is what attempt i’ve been doing yeah i mean if you want to start at the baseline i would do one and four feet exactly like you’re doing but with only a 30 minute rise okay after shaping yeah and that could be your like kind of baseline okay um sorry am i slashing these because at one point maybe hold back yeah i mean but maybe just make a real effort to just be very very light [Music] this is the closest [Music] cecilia is doing a great great job trying to manage both these recipes that said you know we’re just a week away from deadline i’m not sure she’s going to hit both of them and then when she gets done with the pork and the bread you know she’s got to focus on the sandwich which seems like it’s going to be pretty easy easy and straightforward but we’ve got to start making them and start getting through the process and figure out if there are any hurdles to to kind of get over she’s got to stay focused on it and make sure every test counts from this point on cheese um pickles this is what we’ve written up so far [Applause] did i get that order right ham pork salami cheese pickles mustard writing a sandwich recipe is like it’s ridiculous way too many steps and words [Music] the bread i feel like took a long time in the beginning and i had to do a lot of research more so than normal and then we were trying to get a specific interior and a very specific exterior i didn’t expect the bread to be as good as it is like especially the crustiness on the outside i didn’t think was possible with these ovens we’ve been trying for years to do something like that and yeah i’m pretty excited that she pulled it off the sport came a really long way it took me a while to get to the decision that we weren’t going to marinate it in citrus it was dry and the acid was acting on it too much and drying out moisture and now we have this moist really porky delicious i’m really happy where i landed with that cecilia put together a working recipe is what we call it and it’s kind of a sketch for a recipe that she will cook through i have bread that’s about to go in the oven and i break pork shoulders that are about to come out like literally oh yeah [Music] i’m wearing like yeah this bread is really flaky i like how i like other crushes really like crusty yeah no yeah but i thought it’s so much better than anything you could have store-bought you know all right totally different eating experiences i think we’re getting closer tell me your feelings on the flavor and stuff can you eat swiss cheese that’s more surprising to me than the salami is the mobile like it really yeah i like bread yeah that’s good the bread like makes a sandwich for me [Music] i’m really trying to look at every single step and analyze if i need somebody else’s eyes on it do i need another opinion does this feel weird you don’t want any spillover i don’t really like doing this patting the pork on i feel like it’s like you get these bits that roll off it’s much better if you just do slices i think [Music] you know the danger of the triangle because you put too much in your mouth because they’re not going to handle this and try to go too far down we can’t swallow it i don’t like the shredder it’s okay but i can see some mechanical issues where it doesn’t sit flat you know you get like not even sam you see i’ve got the sandwich hinge right there now i got bumped into boom i got pork fell down right there you worked hard to make that i really wish i had a coke right now [Music] inevitably there are you know loose ends there are imperfect instructions there are ways to refine that working recipe to make it better in every case that is always true i don’t think it looks melty enough yeah i know it’s not supposed to be stringy melting too much way too much too much the challenge for her is to take that working recipe look at every single element from the amount of salt in the bread to the exact sort of structural architecture of the sandwich i don’t even know how many matches this is by now one two three four number four this is the color we want still too much ham thank you yeah it’s a lot of ham sorry it’s kind of hey sorry about the ham sorry about you each piece she needs to look at individually different amounts of salt different amount of time in the oven whatever the thing is and determine which is sort of the best within the context of the recipe yes i just really wanted to be done and hope i’m very hopeful oh my mom’s over there okay so i’m gonna call and fingers crossed um i put eight pickles in here you were doing four per side but the team thought that it needed more pickles well because hold on because this because of this photo that happens when you use so few it’s about balance now and that’s the question she has to measure every decision against is this the right way to go about this so you were on like medium low and when i flipped it out it’s good it was just too much [Music] yeah i think it’s fine i’m taking a hard look at every single word and every line and making sure that everything that’s in here written down i can back up basically this this is a bread in the sandwich longevity test so a is made today b is a day old bread c is two days old i’m putting pictures in my log as a reminder what they looked like i could do different kinds of pickles i could do like what i mean like do chips versus the stackers yeah we also have um i know this is like crazy but we have the the bread and butter i know i was gonna say bread and butter well we have a ton of those you’re about to say it for real hi i have sandwiches that daylight right okay i have to see jess through that sandwich i want to see justin with sandwiches okay i’ll see when i put the sandwich down i’m seeing like right now i’m looking at you you see that yeah so we call it daylight i think it’s just the thickness of the board mainly okay of course all right then maybe we should strongly tell people to cool it refrigerate for an hour and then slice it so what i’m doing is i’m getting pork ready then i’m gonna make bread and then when this is done hopefully in about four hours i’m gonna let this cool slice it so i get super thin slices and then hopefully i can use that and make sandwiches and hopefully i’ll be done with sandwiches [Music] just taking down some of the fat cap because you don’t need like really chewy pieces of fat i kind of want them to be rendered so you got to take it down a little bit so the rub is kosher salt brown sugar orange zest lime zest cumin dried oregano red pepper flakes garlic did i say salt i said salt that’s it [Music] i keep snacking on this so i think that’s a good sign [Music] four the sliced pork it pressed better it was easier to manage and our salt for slicing it thinly was to take the roast that you made and chill it down so that it was more firm and easier to get a clean slice so yesterday i had a problem because the pork was really thick this has been cooled pork and sliced thin all right that’s what we want oh my gosh this is the best cuban sandwich i’ve ever had it’s perfect it’s better than anything i had are we clapping this out are you just stretching out [Music] [Applause] [Music] yep pushing it out of the nest actually i just uh i did some totaling up for everything so it was 80 loaves and it was 34 pork butts maybe 24. maybe 24. yeah never take a sandwich but [Applause] oh i got two all right [Applause] i am very happy today that everything went well yeah and people snapped him up there was nothing left so that’s always a good sign i really hope that people make it i really hope that people like it so close to being done i hope it gives people like confidence in the kitchen to make something really good that’s ultimately what i want [Music] so how did it feel when you were doing it the pork was easy yeah everything went pretty smoothly i was a little bit more scared of doing the bread because i never do that but it was interesting to see how sandwiches should be layered i usually just throw everything together [Music] i’m eva katz and i’m a contributing editor at cook’s country magazine i get sent recipes after they’ve been developed they come to me and i give them one last round of testing and today i am testing a cubano sandwich [Music] you